To investigate the mechanisms by which unattended speech impairs short-term memory performance, speech samples were systematically degraded by means of a noise vocoder. For experiment 1, recordings of German and Japanese sentences were passed through a filter bank dividing the spectrum between 50 and 7000 Hz into 20 critical-band channels or combinations of those, yielding 20, 4, 2, or just 1 channel(s) of noise-vocoded speech. Listening tests conducted with native speakers of both languages showed a monotonic decrease in speech intelligibility as the number of frequency channels was reduced. For experiment 2, 40 native German and 40 native Japanese participants were exposed to speech processed in the same manner while trying to memorize visually presented sequences of digits in the correct order. Half of each sample received the German, the other half received the Japanese speech samples. The results show large irrelevant-speech effects increasing in magnitude with the number of frequency channels. The effects are slightly larger when subjects are exposed to their own native language. The results are neither predicted very well by the speech transmission index, nor by psychoacoustical fluctuation strength, most likely, since both metrics fail to disentangle amplitude and frequency modulations in the signals.

Research indicates that a small subset of those who routinely play video games show signs of pathological habits, with side effects ranging from mild (e.g., being late) to quite severe (e.g., losing a job). However, it is still not clear whether individual types, or genres, of games are most strongly associated with Internet gaming disorder (IGD). A sample of 4,744 University of Wisconsin-Madison undergraduates (Mage=18.9 years; SD=1.9 years; 60.5% female) completed questionnaires on general video game playing habits and on symptoms of IGD. Consistent with previous reports: 5.9-10.8% (depending on classification criteria) of individuals who played video games show signs of pathological play. Furthermore, real-time strategy and role-playing video games were more strongly associated with pathological play, compared with action and other games (e.g., phone games). The current investigation adds support to the idea that not all video games are equal. Instead, certain genres of video games, specifically real-time strategy and role-playing/fantasy games, are disproportionately associated with IGD symptoms.

With practice, humans tend to improve their performance on most tasks. But do such improvements then generalize to new tasks? Although early work documented primarily task-specific learning outcomes in the domain of perceptual learning [1-3], an emerging body of research has shown that significant learning generalization is possible under some training conditions [4-9]. Interestingly, however, research in this vein has focused nearly exclusively on just one possible manifestation of learning generalization, wherein training on one task produces an immediate boost to performance on the new task. For instance, it is this form of generalization that is most frequently referred to when discussing learning "transfer" [10, 11]. Essentially no work in this domain has focused on a second possible manifestation of generalization, wherein the knowledge or skills acquired via training, despite not being directly applicable to the new task, nonetheless allow the new task to be learned more efficiently [12-15]. Here, in both the visual category learning and visual perceptual learning domains, we demonstrate that sequentially training participants on tasks that share a common high-level task structure can produce faster learning of new tasks, even in cases where there is no immediate benefit to performance on the new tasks. We further show that methods commonly employed in the field may fail to detect or else conflate generalization that manifests as increased learning rate with generalization that manifests as immediate boosts to performance. These results thus lay the foundation for the various routes to learning generalization to be more thoroughly explored.

A growing body of research--including results from behavioral psychology, human structural and functional imaging, single-cell recordings in nonhuman primates, and computational modeling--suggests that perceptual learning effects are best understood as a change in the ability of higher-level integration or association areas to read out sensory information in the service of particular decisions. Work in this vein has argued that, depending on the training experience, the "rules" for this read-out can either be applicable to new contexts (thus engendering learning generalization) or can apply only to the exact training context (thus resulting in learning specificity). Here we contrast learning tasks designed to promote either stimulus-specific or stimulus-general rules. Specifically, we compare learning transfer across visual orientation following training on three different tasks: an orientation categorization task (which permits an orientation-specific learning solution), an orientation estimation task (which requires an orientation-general learning solution), and an orientation categorization task in which the relevant category boundary shifts on every trial (which lies somewhere between the two tasks above). While the simple orientation-categorization training task resulted in orientation-specific learning, the estimation and moving categorization tasks resulted in significant orientation learning generalization. The general framework tested here--that task specificity or generality can be predicted via an examination of the optimal learning solution--may be useful in building future training paradigms with certain desired outcomes.

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